Movie appeal

Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series

Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series Blu-ray delivers stunning video and audio in this excellent Blu-ray release

Amamizukan is an apartment complex where no boys are allowed. Kurashita Tsukimi, a girl who adores jellyfish, lives there happily with her friends who all have nerdy obsessions of their own. Their peaceful lives gradually start to change when a beautiful woman helps Tsukimi out of a pinch. She stays overnight at the apartments -- but it turns out "she" is really a "he."

For more about Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series and the Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series Blu-ray release, see Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series Blu-ray Review published by Jeffrey Kauffman on February 24, 2012 where this Blu-ray release scored 4.0 out of 5.

Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series Blu-ray Review

The Odd Quintuple.

Have you ever felt like an outcast, like you just don't belong? Well, join the group. Not the group in Princess
Jellyfish, mind you: they're really weird. It's somewhat ironic that real lovers of anime are often
branded with the epithet otaku, which more generally indicates anyone with any particular obsessive
fixation. In the case of Princess Jellyfish we deal with a gaggle of otaku women who all live in the same
apartment house. The heroine of Princess Jellyfish is one Tsukimi Kurashita, an 18 year old resident of Tokyo
who dreams of becoming a manga illustrator. Her real fascination, though, is with jellyfish, something passed
down to her by her mother, an obsession which is depicted in frequent flashbacks showing Tsukimi and her Mom looking
at the gelatinous creatures at an aquarium. Tsukimi ends up at Amamizukan, an apartment house catering to
otakus where she slowly ingratiates herself with an outrÚ group of women (the apartment house only allows
females, which actually leads to one of the weirder subplots of the show, more about which later).

These five women dub themselves the Sisterhood and forge an unlikely alliance that helps them to confront their
individual "issues," as well as helping them make forays out into the wider, supposedly real world. As voice director
Christopher Bevins points out in one of the two commentaries included on this two Blu-ray set, the outsider
ethos of Princess Jellyfish, as well as its gynocentric focus, is fairly reminiscent of another, older anime,
Fruits Basket (which I reviewed for another site many years ago). Princess Jellyfish may not be
quite as surreal as Fruits Basket, though it comes close some of the time, and it repeats that earlier
series' penchant for sweetness mixed with off the wall humor.

In Princess Jellyfish's first episode, Tsukimi rescues a jellyfish that has been placed in a tank with an
inhospitable
other species whose close proximity will end up killing it, something the store owner is unaware of. Initially Tsukimi is
afraid to even talk to the store owner, as he is "chic" while she is a bona fide otaku. Even when she does try to
tell the guy about the problem, she stutters and stammers so much that he thinks she's a bit off her rocker, and is
attempting to throw her out of the store, at which point an ultra glamorous model type shows up and intervenes. This
model manages to convince the store owner to just let Tsukimi have the poor jellyfish, which Tsukimi and the model
take
back to Amamizukan and place in Tsukimi's bathtub. Tsukimi christens the little critter Clara. The model ends up
sleeping
over, and the next morning Tsukimi is shocked and horrified to discover that "she" (the model) is actually a "he", a
cross-
dressing young boy named Kuranosuke. That leads to a whole series of comic misadventures, as first of all Kuranosuke
as
a male is not allowed on the premises, but perhaps even more disturbingly in his guise as a female he (she?) is
way too glamorous for the other otakus at the apartment house.

The rest of the series (which as of yet has not had a second season announced) plays out in small interactions
between the five bizarre women who share housing, each of them with their own particular (and peculiar) obsessions.
One of them, Chieko, who dresses more or less as a traditional geisha, is manager of the building, which her mother
owns. It turns out her mother is considering selling the building to Kuranosuke's brother, Shu, who is a real estate
developer. That provides quite a bit of "drama" (meaning out there comedy) for the series' second half of episodes, as
the Sisterhood has to come to grips with potentially being thrust out into the big, wide world that they're all
spectacularly ill equipped to handle.

Princess Jellyfish is an incredibly sweet, good natured show that should appeal to anyone who has ever felt
they don't quite fit in. The characters are all extremely exaggerated, as might be expected, but they're also all
surprisingly lovable. This series (as well as its source manga) was specifically designed to appeal to girls, and therefore
there's little amped up action at hand here. This is a kinder, gentler anime that finds humor in bizarre interactions and
that ever present dialectic between the nerds and the cool kids. Chances are more people are going to identify with
the otaku category than with the "stylish" folks, and that makes Princess Jellyfish a show that speaks to
many, not just one gender or class.

Princess Jellyfish is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FUNimation Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer
in 1.78:1. This is one of the brightest and most appealing looking animes in some time, one that trades in on Tsukimi's
ambitions to be an illustrator with an often cool and innovative animation style that actually resembles some of those
classic magazine illustrations from the sixties (see the fifth screencap for a good example). The series also exploits purely
graphical elements a lot of the time, and at other times the characters almost resemble paper cutouts, without surrounding
lines, a la South Park. Colors are incredibly vivid and well saturated, and line detail is very strong and consistent.
The series has some unusual character designs for an anime (not Tsukimi's rather "forcefully" drawn eyebrows for a good
example), and those all pop very well in this splendid looking high definition presentation.

Princess Jellyfish offers two lossless audio options, the original Japanese language track delivered courtesy of a
Dolby TrueHD 2.0 stereo mix, and a very good English dub (with a glut of FUNimation voice actor regulars) delivered via
Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround mix. The original language track is perhaps a bit sweeter and less weirdly boisterous than the
English language track, but fidelity here is strong and the stereo presentation, while certainly not at the immersive level of
the 5.1 track, is rather well handled. The 5.1 track is just off the wall a lot of the time from a voice actor standpoint, and it
also offers sterling fidelity and very good dynamic range. The show's appealing score is significantly opened up in the
surround track as well.

Episode 1 Commentary features Voice Director Christopher Bevins, who also voices Hanamori, as well
as Maxey Whitehead (Tsukimi) and Josh Grelle (Kuranosuke). These three "old hands" talk about how special they all
feel Princess Jellyfish is, especially in an oversaturated anime market.

Though Princess Jellyfish's original source was ostensibly a Shōjo manga marketed to females, something
that the series also tends to emulate, even guys may find a lot to like about this series. Weirdly funny and always visually
very interesting, this series is sweet and bizarre in equal measures. Watching these five outsiders band together is a
lesson in "strength in numbers," and the series finds a very appealing tone that manages to be both out there and oddly
real feeling at its emotional core. With great looking visuals, excellent audio and nice supply of supplements, this release
comes Recommended.

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Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series Blu-ray, News and Updates

FUNimation will bring Princess Jellyfish: The Complete Series to Blu-ray next month. This anime focuses on bored young illustrator Tsukimi, whose aimless life suddenly becomes much more exciting when she brings home a male sea jelly/beauty queen who takes it on ...

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